SANTA CRUZ — Even while federal agencies celebrated on Thursday a 5 percent one-year national decline in reported veteran homelessness, a collective local effort has whittled its tally down from approximately 245 in January 2014 to 49 this week.

“Our community is really committed to ending homelessness. It’s a bright spot for us,” said Santa Cruz Veterans Resource Centers of America site manager Ingrid Trejo, who keeps a “by-name” list of the area’s known homeless veterans. “It’s the one place where we really are making lots of headway in terms of homelessness.”

The national effort to end veteran homelessness stuttered last year in reducing homeless veteran counts for the first time since 2011, but regained some momentum by early 2018, according to statistics released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“We owe it to our veterans, the men and women who defended this nation, that they have a place to call home,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said during a press teleconference Thursday morning. “We’ve made great strides to end veteran homelessness, but we still have a lot of work to do to ensure that those who wore our nation’s uniform have access to stable housing.”

Santa Cruz County Homeless Coordinator Rayne Marr said the region has made a “huge improvement” in housing veterans.

Though national HUD numbers compiled for the Santa Cruz County area through January 2018 show the area failed to make similar strides in housing its veterans with 245 counted homeless veterans, compared to 236 counted in 2017, the data does not reflect a real-time count, officials said. According to Trejo, Santa Cruz County’s total homeless veteran count in January was actually 112.

In Santa Cruz County’s 2017 homeless census, 92 percent of the veterans were living unsheltered. Veterans represented more than 10 percent of the total 2,249 homeless individuals counted on a single January 2017 day.

Carson and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie attributed the national veteran housing effort’s success, in part, to HUD’s Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing rental assistance vouchers. In October, HUD awarded 24 such new veteran housing vouchers to the Santa Cruz County Housing Authority. Officials also considered so-called “wrap-around services,” such as case management and mental health treatment, as factors.

Marr said a recent effort to update the county’s strategic homeless plan identified a weak point in the housing voucher program — which only applies to veterans who have been honorably discharged from the military.

Michelle Obama’s Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness initiative began in 2014, initially with a goal to reach “zero” homeless veterans by 2016. Since that time, 634 communities and three states have declared an effective end to veteran homelessness, meaning any additional homeless veterans annually are offset by a higher number that has been housed.

During the press conference Thursday, officials also noted a broadening of HUD and Veterans Affairs’ outreach efforts to all types of homelessness. Carson distanced himself from offering a new goal end date for veteran homelessness, saying, “The date would be as soon as possible, I don’t think I can be more specific than that.”